• Liudmila Leppik, Mit B Bhavsar, Karla M C Oliveira, Maria Eischen-Loges, Sahba Mobini, and John H Barker.
• Frankfurt Initiative for Regenerative Medicine, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University; Liudmila.Leppik@kgu.de.
• J Vis Exp. 2019 Jan 31 (143).

AbstractMesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) have been used extensively to promote bone healing in tissue engineering approaches. Electrical stimulation (EStim) has been demonstrated to increase MSC osteogenic differentiation in vitro and promote bone healing in clinical settings. Here we describe the construction of an EStim cell culture chamber and its use in treating rat bone-marrow-derived MSC to enhance osteogenic differentiation. We found that treating MSCs with EStim for 7 days results in a significant increase in the osteogenic differentiation, and importantly, this pro-osteogenic effect persists long after (7 days) EStim is discontinued. This approach of pretreating MSCs with EStim to enhance osteogenic differentiation could be used to optimize bone tissue engineering treatment outcomes and, thus, help them to achieve their full therapeutic potential. In addition to this application, this EStim cell culture chamber and protocol can also be used to investigate other EStim-sensitive cell behaviors, such as migration, proliferation, apoptosis, and scaffold attachment.

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